Quote

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Zadie Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Every
Twice
Life
Outside
Inside
Moment
Moments
Happens
Two
Different
Histories

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
Zadie Smith
Image
For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
Image
It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
Zadie Smith
Image
No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
Zadie Smith
Image
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
Zadie Smith
Image
…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Image
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Zadie Smith
Image
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
Image
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
Image
I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
Zadie Smith
Image
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
Zadie Smith
Image
I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
Zadie Smith
Image
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Zadie Smith
Image
It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
Zadie Smith
Image
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
Image
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
Image
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
Zadie Smith
Image
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
Zadie Smith
Image
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith